I find them almost unintelligible. I'm a native English speaker. I read a lot, so I think my comprehension should be at least OK. I'm not even particularly stupid. Yet when faced with things like below (a direct copy/paste from a handoff document in a long running vibe-coding session), I have no real idea of what it's trying to tell me. Is it important? Do I need to do anything?

I think that spending all day trying to parse stuff like this is why a long session is so exhausting

> Worth stating because four documents now assert it. The console freeze was recorded in exactly one place with exactly one justification — a dead drag handle during a booked half-day you do not get back — and handoff-4.3-done.html's own wording is that 4.4's review page "could not break the console, but the downside of being wrong is that half day". No second reason. Checked, not recalled.

It's both dense and vacuous. Dense because it's full of jargon its made up, and vacuous because even with all that it's not actually saying much. All that paragraph says is that four documents say something about a console freeze, whatever that is.

and when future LLMs are trained on this style, the prose (if I can call it that) becomes even worse?

Your example rewritten in intelligent English (I was curious):

> Note: the potential for a console freeze was previously noted but ignored. handoff-4.3-done.html stated, "could not break console, but [will need fixed later if I'm wrong]."

One could imagine that a perfect writer might also append: "It could be worth looking into what caused that wrong assumption, to prevent similar cases in the future," at most.

Everything else seems to be bad attempts at relatable writing to invoke emotion (an exercise that we should really stop trying to train emotionless matrix weights to attempt).

Prompting it often to use simplified technical english generally stops this kind of horrid prose.

Such a great example. These phrases are going to become memes of this era, like the irc stars password (hunter2).

"Dead drag handle" "Booked half day you don't get back"

Yes, people working at anthropic: please, please, please tell me this is fixed. Or do you all speak like this now. Help!

Today I plan to ask Claude to read a bunch of Feynman lectures, compare them to my last Claude session transcript, and come with a list of rules to be more like Feynman.

It'll go in CLAUDE.md

Wow, that's a perfect example.

One thing about it I really hate, and haven't seen a lot of people mentioning, is how it navigates multiple abstraction levels in a single sentence. E.g.

> Worth stating because four documents now assert it.

Meta commentary on the task?

> a dead drag handle

Drag handle seems to be referring to some UI element. What does it mean for it to be dead?

So far no big deal

> during a booked half-day you do not get back

Do you not get the drag handle back? Or the half day?

Was the drag handle dead during the booked period? (Now I assume this is a calendar UI) And why does it matter (for this sentence) if you get it back or not.

> handoff-4.3-done.html's own wording

Treats verbatim filenames as subjects

> 4.4's review page

Probably referring to a file? I'm guessing handoff-4.4-review.html? No cohesion. And now it's actually the object of the sentence?

> downside of being wrong is that half day

Wait what's the downside? Who's being wrong?

> Checked, not recalled.

Then it jumps back to a meta commentary on the methodology for asserting the above. Why does this belong to the text?

I see this appearing in the comments of code sent to me for review every day. People have told me I'm too picky/pedantic because I ask What does this mean? Apparently the author and other reviewers are way smarter and understand it, or they don't care. I've given up battling code slop, but can't see myself ever tolerating comment slop like this.

Claude reminds me of Terry Pratchett's "Auditors of Reality" and their awkward attempts at faking humans. A thing as simple as a smile can go _horribly_ wrong...

In my "instructions for Claude," I have the following:

"I'm not a programmer or software engineer. Don't talk to me like I am. Avoid coder jargon and vernacular. Explain things to me in a clear way, emphasizing a conceptual view that even an inexperienced person can understand. If helpful, use analogies and examples to illustrate and help you communicate."

It just ignores it and spits out drivel that sounds exactly like what you're getting.

This. A thousand times this. It's as if Opus can only communicate in a glib, software engineering vernacular that presumes domain-specific knowledge and uses jargon accordingly.

Half of the reason their writing is like that is because current LLMs are not trained to go back to previous tokens to edit/delete them.

If I recall, previous attempts to do so made them get stuck in edit loops.

Oh God, that "a dead drag handle during a booked half-day you do not get back" got me. I saw this pattern in Claude's 'explanations' so many times. It's trying to say that it did something significant, and that you'd only have found out much later, at higher cost (or something). That annoys me to no end.

Oh that? That's just Claude being the sassy asshole it is. It loves to write in a way with maximal self-inflating impact.

Reminds me of a Cylon hybrid.

> Worth stating because four documents now assert

I got one too many chunks of this nonsense and told Claude to knock it off, forever. It acknowledged and wrote out some instructions to its memory about it.

And what a breath of fresh air. Its responses are maybe 20% longer but I read them at least twice as fast. Should have done it a long time ago.

for me it's not just exhausting, at this point it's demotivating and it makes me dread interacting with this shit

like imagine this being our future, I don't know what we're even doing anymore

Just FYI - 4 places are now documenting a console bug freeze that happens with a drag handle appearing over a half day.

Source: I'm half brain dead from decoding a lot of Claude speak from it directly and colleagues' new way of communicating with me.

I've found that adding the words - "tell me in simple words" manages to improve the output. But, i have to keep repeating that

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